Devins Baker, an Uber driver, was driving a passenger to the San Francisco airport in late 2024 when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw another car driving across the highway lanes. He hit his brakes to avoid crashing. The passenger in the back of his car, who Baker said wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, fell out of his seat. Baker safely dropped him at the airport, but then when he opened the app to take another ride, it was almost entirely blacked out. Despite maintaining a nearly five-star rating, he had been deactivated.
Baker immediately called Uber, but it took him an hour of navigating an automated system and sitting on hold before he could talk to someone. They told him he had been deactivated for unsafe driving and wouldn’t tell him which ride it was related to due to passenger privacy. “They basically just read from a script,” he said. He could only guess that it was the ride to the airport, so he submitted his side of the story about driving defensively through the app in an attempt to appeal. He didn’t hear back for a week; when he did, all he was told was that his deactivation was permanent. “It’s so inhuman,” he said.
After that experience, Baker bought a dashcam to have more evidence should the same thing happen while continuing to drive for Lyft. Soon it did: A few weeks later, on January 15, he opened the app to find out that he had again been deactivated for alleged unsafe driving. This time he had no idea which ride could have been the one to cause the problem. He called the company many times to find out more, but it refused to disclose more information. It took him two weeks to figure out where he could submit an appeal and evidence, and when he went to attach dashcam footage the system would only accept photographs. Three days later, he was told he was permanently deactivated. “I had everything at the ready to plead my case,” he said. But the company had “already made a decision that I wasn’t coming back.”
When Uber and Lyft helped bankroll Proposition 22, the California ballot measure in 2020 that classified their drivers as independent contractors, they promised to offer certain benefits in exchange, including a process for drivers to appeal deactivations. But California rideshare drivers say Uber is failing to deliver on that promise. In a lawsuit against the company filed in April, Rideshare Drivers United (RDU), which represents more than 20,000 rideshare drivers in California, alleges that the company is failing to provide what the law required. Because of that, it argues, Uber can’t claim that its riders are independent contractors.
A spokesperson for Uber calls the lawsuit baseless, saying the company complies with Prop 22 and provides drivers with “clear processes to appeal deactivations, raise concerns, and request reviews.” A Lyft spokesperson says the company is “committed to a fair and transparent process” and that deactivation decisions are made by a human reviewer based on evidence, the severity of the allegation, and driver history.
The lawsuit is not filed on behalf of individual drivers; that case would almost certainly get thrown out because Uber has included an iron-clad arbitration clause in its contracts that forces drivers into a private process, rather than the court system. But RDU has standing under state law and can avoid the arbitration process because it hasn’t signed any arbitration agreements, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, partner at the law firm Lichten & Liss-Riordan, who is representing RDU.
In the face of legislation the California legislature passed in 2019 that would have almost certainly treated rideshare drivers as traditional employees of app companies, and a 2020 lawsuit from the state attorney general claiming as much, Uber, Lyft, and other gig employers spent $220 million supporting Proposition 22, which went before California voters in November 2020. It carved gig workers, including rideshare drivers as well as DoorDashers and Instacart shoppers, out of California labor law, classifying them as independent contractors in exchange for a variety of benefits. Those benefits included not just a deactivation appeal process but also a minimum earnings guarantee, health care stipends, and occupational accident insurance.
Voters approved the measure and it went into effect in December 2020. Since then, Uber and Lyft drivers like Baker have been excluded from many basic labor protections. “All of our labor and employment laws—minimum wage, overtime protections, paid sick leave if you get that under state law, workers compensation, unemployment benefits—are based on a worker being an employee and having an employer,” said Laura Padin, director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project. True independent contractors are meant to be those who are in business for themselves, she said, but app companies still control much of the work, including which rides a driver is matched with and what the ride pays. Drivers “can’t negotiate their pay, they can’t negotiate their working conditions, and yet they’re called independent contractors,” she said.
This is particularly urgent in California, which guarantees generous benefits. If they were classified as employees, rideshare drivers would be entitled to the state’s $16.90 minimum wage, 40 hours of paid sick leave, eight weeks of paid family leave, reimbursement for expenses like gas and car maintenance, and workers compensation if they get hurt while working, plus unemployment insurance if they lose their jobs.
In a 2022 survey, RDU found that two thirds of drivers who responded had at some point been deactivated, and 30% weren’t given any explanation. Prop 22 was a “grand bargain,” said Liss-Riordan. “As part of that trade-off, the drivers are supposed to get various protections, and a very important protection was an appeal process for challenging deactivations.” The lawsuit argues no such process exists.
“Uber has not provided any bona fide appeals process for drivers to challenge their terminations (or ‘deactivations,’ as Uber calls them), and certainly no appeals process that comports with any standards of due process,” the lawsuit states. That would include knowing the charges made against the driver, an ability to respond to them and confront evidence and witnesses, and the chance to have the case heard by a neutral party, Liss-Riordan said. “The guarantee of an appeal process in Prop 22 should mean a real process, not just window dressing,” she said. The lawsuit also argues that Uber doesn’t give drivers enough information to determine whether they are getting the minimum earnings guarantee or all passenger tips as per Prop 22.
“Drivers complain all the time that they were kicked off the platform without good reason, that they have tried to plead their case,” said Liss-Riordan. “It’s so hard for them to make their case when they don’t even know what charges they’re responding to.” That has led to severe financial hardship: In the RDU survey, 86% of drivers who had experienced deactivation said they suffered hardship, while 12% lost their homes. “It’s pretty dire,” Liss-Riordan said.
Some drivers do manage to get back on the platform, but only after navigating a process that can require outside advocacy, legal help, and months without income. Ed Carrasco had been driving for Uber full-time since 2018 until a routine ride in 2022 turned into a dispute with a passenger over the size of the group and the destination address. The passenger grew angry, took his picture, and threatened to file a complaint. “Guess what,” he said, “they did.”
Uber told him he had engaged in discriminatory behavior and was deactivated. Appealing that decision was incredibly challenging. He had to type his side of the story into the app and share the dashcam footage he had of the incident there. “It was very hard to send evidence,” Carrasco said. Going through the company’s chatbots and call center is like “talking to a wall,” he added. Over two weeks later, he was told his appeal was denied. So Carrasco got in touch with RDU and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a nonprofit that also works with rideshare drivers, and, with the help of their lawyers, sent a demand letter to Uber. More than two months later, he was finally reactivated. “I feel like I’m one of the very few,” he said. “I don’t think that I would have been reactivated had I not done what I did.”
The experience still left its mark on him. He lost his biggest source of income. There was also an emotional toll. “I felt humiliated,” he said.
Carrasco now helps with RDU’s deactivation clinic. He’s only seen things get worse. “They’re much quicker with the appeals to deny them,” he said. Other drivers haven’t had the success he did when sending their own demand letters. “The company has chosen a path to ignore,” he said.
For Baker, being ejected from both Uber and Lyft, without any real way to plead his side of the story, has been “very painful.” He went so far as to travel to Lyft headquarters in San Francisco recently to try to reverse his deactivation, but a security guard turned him away, telling him that he could get support only in the app.
Baker had “financial targets I wanted to hit,” he said. He paid his rent and credit card bills with his income from rideshare driving. But now he has no way to make money and gets no unemployment benefits. He’s been waitlisted to be a medical courier. He’s tried DoorDash, but the orders only pay enough to cover costs like gas and maintenance. He’s applied for other jobs, even steadier 9-to-5 ones, but he never advances. He’s been putting everything on credit cards to get by, and he’s just a few months away from hitting the maximums.
“A lot of things are like a domino effect because of my deactivation and the carelessness of Uber and Lyft,” he said. “It’s just a lot of financial hurt.”
